


Deciduous

by Sugarymemes



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt, trigger warning: suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-03 01:30:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10956885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sugarymemes/pseuds/Sugarymemes
Summary: * Sequel to Evergreen *A look at the universe without Katie Holt after her suicide.





	Deciduous

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to my other work titled "Evergreen" - so if you haven't read that, please do ♡

Questions filled the already crowded air, meeting the silence in a bitter pas de deux as words seemed to lose themselves in the vastness of space. Stars seemed to shimmer and twinkle across the night sky - intertwined with the swirling galaxies of beautiful pink and purple hues. There was no emerald accent, though. No peridot suns or jade sunsets. Just the emptiness as they remembered what they had lost.

They had found her the morning after. Brightly coloured tablets spilled on the floor like a child's candy as she lay, Hazel eyes wide open with a painful opalescence. Shaking fingers took a frozen wrist into hand and tears rolled down cheeks as they held each other, desperately trying to hold themselves together because they were falling apart.

How was she gone? How was she dead?

They would've said that she was in a better place now, but she belonged here, with them. Thoughts raced around their heads like orbiting satellites as they wondered if they could've done anything different, if they could've prevented this. An overwhelming sense of responsibility made their hearts ache but they couldn't apologise to her now. They couldn't fix it now.

Lance had kicked and screamed - trying to drag her to the pods. He refused to believe it. He wouldn't believe it. She wasn't gone - she just needed healing. She would heal and she'd be fixed and alive and it'd all be okay -

Those glazed over eyes haunted him every single time he closed his own.

Keith would hold him through those silent and awful nights. Tears would roll down his cheeks as the hours passed by. He thought it might get easier. It never got easier. Why wouldn't it get easier?

He cursed all of the Gods that were out there - not caring for blasphemy or the potential wrath from disrupting the great chain of being. Those so-called ethereal beings had taken another innocent and it wasn't fair. He'd happily commit deicide if it'd mean she'd still be breathing. He'd go to hell and back to see her smile once more. He wouldn't even need to come back.

Yet breathing seemed to escape Hunk as he sat by her cold and still body. Statuesque in every way, he desperately hoped that she was happy now. Because they'd all sacrificed their happiness for hers. He wondered how much she'd thought about what was being left behind once she'd gone. They were all being left to clean up her mess, pick up the pieces, and he wanted to be angry - he wanted to be so angry, but instead he'd sit, talking to the corpse covered in the cotton shroud as his hands grazed hers as he tried to feel that bit closer to what he had lost.

And Shiro, oh God, Shiro. Always silent in the strong and stotic way - he now found his inability to verbalise a bitter hamartia, and an even more bitter reminder of the fact that she too had been unable to verbalise her feelings - and look what had happened. 

Scars littered his body, both old and new, as he tried to make sense of her awful, awful deed. He'd failed to protect her. He hadn't noticed the signs. He was always too selfish - too wrapped up in himself to ever notice those that he was meant to be caring for. He'd lost a friend, and a mentor. But she'd lost her family. She'd lost her family and the only one that came back was him.

They found Matt a few weeks later.

It was what they needed to do for her - respect her memory, her dying wishes. Bring her family home. It sadden them all to think that she had had to die for them to finally find him, but death was a powerful motivator and they knew that they'd already let her down too much.

Samuel was long dead. Bloodied and broken remains were all that were found in a makeshift morgue. Eyes dull, with a mouth wide open in a silent scream as dried blood trickled from his mouth as a river. The stream of time was such a cruel thing. She hadn't even gotten to say goodbye. They hadn't said goodbye to her, but they supposed that at least she was with her father once more. How tragic it was that it had to be in death.

Matthew would lie in the room that these strangers had claimed belonged to her sister, surrounding himself with her clothes, her technology, every strange little piece of machinery acting as a key as he began to unlock the tragic reality of a sister that he realised he'd never known.

He'd cry, and Shiro would cry. They'd lie together, the picture of Katie and Matt dampened with tears because they both feared that they would forget her face, forget that beautiful and gorgeous and kind face. They would never let that happen. Matt would remember the photograph when he closed his eyes, but Shiro would remember that deathly pale face and the plethora of rainbow coloured tablets that seemed so tempting, even to him.

Royalty didn't come without it's flaws, either. Allura was sadly not unfamiliar with the sour taste of death, but somehow, she felt more responsible than she ever had for the tiny corpse lying amongst a multitude of medicine, medicine that was meant to heal, to help. Not create more hurt. She hoped that Pidge's death had been relatively painless. And even if it had been, then that pain had not dispersed across the galaxies - it been turned into hundreds of thousands of minute spears that pierced the hearts of anyone who had ever had their presence graced by the green paladin. 

Coran was reminded of the family that he'd lost to a most gruesome war. Of those who were not killed by the Galra, many of then killed themselves. He had thought that such a choice was somewhat noble - choosing to die at their own hands, rather than at those of the enemy. He'd lost his husband and son to the Galra, and his daughter to herself.

Pidge was nothing like his daughter. His daughter was tall, and elegant, and she was scared, so scared. And he'd always thought that Pidge had been fearless, but he saw that same fear in her deadened eyes as he did in his daughters' own. That same fearful scrawl as they both tried to fit a lifetime of unsaid words onto a single page.

The green notebook lying at her side had been passed around the paladins, so they could each in turn read her final goodbyes. The pages belonging to her father and mother had been left alone out of respect, and Iverson's had been left out of bitterness. They didn't think he deserved an iota of her time, especially not in the moments leading up to her death.

As they read the last page together, they could feel themselves struggling to breathe along with her. They could feel her fear, and their hearts broke as they desperately longed to have her back with them. She hadn't wanted to die. In her last moments, her dying moments, fear was the only thing coursing through her veins apart from those sickening poisons that she had ingested.

And it was painful. It was so painful, as they realised that the decision she had been so sure of was the terror that she held in her heart. It was so painful as they realised that this was an uneraseable mistake, that they couldn't just restart the game from the last save, that she was really gone. 

Guilt plagued their hearts as they cried and tried to protect a universe that had been so very cruel to their green paladin. And life continued on in the same glowing vein as it always had, but instead of fighting one force, they were fighting everything that had taken her from them. 

She said that she was weak. She'd said that she was weak, and the Shiro had punched the wall and Lance had shook and sobbed, and Keith had held him and cried too and Hunk had sat, just squeezing her hand, as he prayed that she'd squeeze it back. She never did. And that weakness that she'd believed she'd held dear seemed to diffuse to the ends of the universe, because all that was left was strength.

They fought. They fought in the name of Pidge, or Katie - it didn't matter because they knew exactly what they were fighting for, and who they were fighting for. In every star, every single inch of the glowing galaxies and stunning night skies they saw her, and they knew how much she believed in them. They could only look on fondly and desperately wish that she'd believed in herself as much as she had in them, and they hoped that wherever she was, she'd found peace and happiness and serenity because after going through hell, heaven was all that she deserved.

But victory didn't come without pain, and bloodshed. 

The scars littering Shiro's body were replaced by bigger and angrier marks, but they simply reminded him of what he'd fought for, and what he would never, ever stop fighting for. He'd run his fingers across the raised skin as he fought against the universe and the war that ravaged his mind, but he knew that he must win.

And those marks fell across every single one of their bodies and they clinked glasses and gave a toast to what they'd lost before every battle as they prayed they'd come out alive on the other side after it all. But they knew that even if they didn't, that would be okay. They weren't scared anymore. They threw their heads back in careless laughter and raised their glasses up to the starry skies and waited patiently for the day that they would be able to go home.

The day finally came when the universe was safe. It wasn't free - but it was safe, and for the most part - peaceful. Team Voltron had done its job, and the remaining two of an extinct race had sadly taken the others back to that blue planet that they'd dreamed of every single night for the past few years.

Colleen Holt cried as she'd held the emaciated form of son she thought she'd lost in her arms, holding him ecer closer - ever tighter, refusing to ever let him go. And she cried even harder as she held her daughter, her ashes - stored in a sparkling green urn. She'd lost her family, and though she was heartbroken at the thought that it would never be whole again, but thanked the heavens that she wasn’t alone in this universe.

Pidge, - or Katie - resided on the mantlepiece, watching over them all, protecting them all, as they struggled to adjust to life back on earth. And Colleen read her daughters' dying letters, and she cried, and they all cried though they thought that they had long since run out of tears. She felt like she was dying at every single word, as she imagined her daughter writing those letters, alone - and scared.

She cursed the other paladins - they were entrusted with protecting the universe, but they couldn't protect her daughter from herself. They didn't blame her. They all thought that they had made their peace with her death, but realised that they'd just pushed those feelings down, so deep down, where nobody could ever find them. They'd buried them in concrete and vowed not to open it for another hundred years, as if she was Chernobyl, and her radioactivity still punished them all.

But they knew that they couldn't blame themselves forever. And they couldn't blame Pidge, or the Galra, or any single pinpointed entity across the entire universe - because it was simply and awful amalgamation of too, too many factors. Pidge was gone. And perhaps it was all an awful, awful mistake - but that wouldn't change anything now, because they knew that they needed to let her go.

She'd said she wanted to be put to rest among the stars. So they made fireworks. Beautiful, sparkling fireworks that burned brightly, and quickly - and then were gone, much like Pidge herself. They'd integrated her ashes into the fireworks, and she burst up into the heavens and was sprinkled all over the earth that she'd longed for.

They all stood on the top of a hill as Pidge's fireworks were launched. Sandwiched between the sparkling night sky and the glistening lights of the city, and she exploded into a series of the most glorious and spectacular emerald blooms that seemed to light up the heavens and illuminate the starry skies and breathe new light into their lives as they hoped that now she was finally free.

Because after everything she'd been through, all she deserved was to find tranquillity among the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Suicide is never the answer, and if you ever feel like it is - please, please talk to someone. Talk to a counsellor - your friends, your family. Hell - talk to me. I know I'm a stranger on the Internet, but I've been there. And I'm gonna make it out the other side ♡
> 
> You can find me at togepixels.tumblr.com if you ever, EVER need to chat, or if you just want to chat xx Love you all, stay safe c:


End file.
